The car was a write-off. The whole front left was gone.
The glove box opened on the second try.
Inside there were the manual, an ice scraper, a packet of tissues, and a letter from Wexford Savings addressed to me at Quarry Row, opened, refolded, and put back in its envelope.
Dated eleven days before the accident.
It was a standard notification of the sort a bank sends when a loan account is opened. Home equity line of credit, secured against the property at Quarry Row. One hundred and eighty thousand dollars, drawn in full, in three tranches.
It listed the disbursement address for the correspondence.
Fennimore Court, unit 906.
I read the address four times before it did anything. I had been sleeping in that building for two nights. I had made tea in that kitchen that morning.
I sat in the driver’s seat of my own wrecked car in a gravel lot in the middle of the afternoon and everything came back, and it came back all at once and it was not gentle.
I had opened that letter on a Tuesday morning. I had stood in my own kitchen and read it twice and then looked up the address on my phone at the counter. I remember the countertop. I remember that I did not call him, because if I called him he would have an hour to think.
I got in the car and I drove toward Fennimore Court, and I never got there, because a delivery van went through the light at Vesper Road at four in the afternoon.
That is the whole thing. That is what the two hours contained.
I had faked losing my memory as a joke, in a hospital bed, twenty hours after actually losing the only two hours that mattered.
And my husband had looked at a woman who could not remember why she’d been driving, and he had made a decision in about one second, and he had said: I’m your brother.
I want to be fair, and this is the closest to fair I can get.
I do not think he planned it. I have never thought he planned it. Pia was three floors up in the same building, on the same insurance, in the same system, and a nurse could have said the wrong sentence in either room at any moment of any day.
He had about a second and a half, and he improvised, and then he had to build seven days on top of it.
But the loan was eleven days before the crash. The apartment was four months before that. The signature on the loan application — and I have seen it, at a table in Harriet Nunn’s office with a magnifier — is a competent, unhurried, careful forgery of my name.
That took an afternoon and a steady hand. That was not a second and a half.
And there is one more thing about the letter in the glove box that I have never been able to put down.
It was refolded.
Not crumpled, not shoved. Folded back along its original creases and returned to its envelope, which is a thing I do, which is a thing I have done with every piece of paper I have ever been upset by, and which is the single most me detail in this entire account.
I read that letter in my own kitchen and my hands were steady enough to fold it in thirds.
I have thought about that woman standing at the counter a great deal. She had eleven days of not knowing left, and about six hours of knowing, and then a van at an intersection took the six hours away from her and gave her back to me four days later in a hospital bed, mid-joke.
